Daily Archives: October 24, 2011

In an email message addressed to me and a number of other recipients over the weekend, Platform Computing CEO Songnian Zhou referred to a blog post he wrote — he jokingly referred to it as the “world’s most long-winded” — that explains why and how his company’s acquisition by IBM unfolded.

The post covers Platform’s 19-year chronology as well as the big-picture evolution of distributed computing. It’s a good read, well worth checking out. Zhou knows his subject matter well, writes in a refreshingly jargon- and hype-free style, and he covers a lot of ground. What’s more, the post isn’t nearly as prolix as he make it out to be.

Breaking It Down

As for how the acquisition came about, Zhou explains that it was driven by market dynamics and technological advances:

“The foundation of this acquisition is the ever expanding technical computing market going mainstream. IDC has been tracking this technical computing systems market segment at $14B, or 20% of the overall systems market. It is growing at 8%/year, or twice the growth rate of servers overall. Both IDC and users also point out that the biggest bottleneck to wider adoption is the complexity of clusters and grids, and thus the escalating needs for middleware and management software to hide all the moving parts and just deliver IT as a service. You see, it’s well worth paying a little for management software to get the most out of your hardware. Platform has a single mission: to rapidly deliver effective distributed computing management software to the enterprise. On our own, especially in the early days when going was tough, we have been doing a pretty good job for some enterprises in some parts of the world. But, we are only 536 heroes. Combined with IBM, we can get to all the enterprises worldwide. We have helped our customers to run their businesses better, faster, cheaper. After 19 years, IBM convinced us that there can also be a “better, faster, cheaper” way to help more customers and to grow our business. As they say, it’s all about leverage and scale.”

In a previous post I wrote about acquisition, I wondered, as have others, about how IBM’s ownership of Platform and its technology might affect the latter’s ability to support heterogeneous systems encompassing servers from IBM’s competitors. Zhou suggests that won’t be a problem, that a post-acquisition Platform “will work even harder to add value to our partners, including IBM’s competitors.”

That said, even assuming that IBM takes a systems-centric view with Platform, continuing to allow the acquired company to support heterogeneous environments, one has to wonder whether Dell, HP and others will be as receptive to Platform as they were before. It’s a fair question, and those vendors, as well as Platform’s installed base of customers, ultimately will provide the answer.

Networking vendors can be (and are) ONF members, but one needs to appreciate their place in the foundation’s hierarchy. They are second-class citizens, and they are not setting the agenda. One more time, I will list the “founding and board members” of the ONF: Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Microsoft is there by dint of its status as a cloud service provider, not because it is a technology vendor.

“ . . . . Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Director Dan Pitt gave an excellent presentation that demonstrated that the ONF put a lot of thought into how they designed and structured the organization to incorporate lessons learned from older standards bodies, software communities and from the devops and open source movements. He noted that the ONF’s charter would not allow technology vendors to serve on the board of directors, but rather it should be governed by the network operators who have to live with the results. Working group chairs are assigned by the board, and a system of checks and balances has been put into place to try to prevent the problems that some standards organizations have become notorious for.”

It’s All About the Money

The message is clear. The network operators know what they want from SDN and OpenFlow, and they believe they know how to get it. What’s more, they don’t want the networking vendors compromising, subverting, or undermining the result.* (*Not that they’d do that sort of thing, of course.)

What, then, is the overriding objective these big network operators have in mind? Well, it’s to save money, as I explained in my previous post. SDN, and especially SDN enabled by an industry-standard protocol such as OpenFlow, is perceived by the major service providers as a means of substantially reducing network-related capital and, more to the point, operating expenditures. Service-provider executives, especially the mahogany-row bean counters, get excited about that sort of thing.

“Stuart Elby, VP and network architecture & technology chief technologist for Verizon Digital Media Services, laid out how the promise of software-defined networking could make the company’s cost curve match its revenue by cutting down on the need for expensive gear that is costly to buy and even more costly to operate. In a conversation before his presentation, Elby explained how Verizon’s network can view every single packet on the network, but how keeping track of those packets is both a big data problem and expensive from a network management perspective.”

Verizon’s Compelling Chart

Verizon is not alone. Every one of the founding players in ONF sees the same business value in OpenFlow-enabled SDN. In the eyes of the ONF’s most powerful players, conventional network infrastructure is holding back substantial business benefits. It’s not personal, but it is business. And it is how and why major tectonic shifts in this industry come about.

Along those lines, Elby presented a visually powerful illustration that makes clear just how big an issue network-related costs are for Verizon. The chart is reproduced in Higginbotham’s article at GigaOM and in Fewell’s piece at NetworkWorld. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you take a look. It really is worth a thousand words, but I’ll summarize as follows: Verizon’s network operating costs soon will surpass its revenues, resulting in what Verizon quaintly calls a “non-sustainable business case.” Therefore, there is an urgent need for a solution that lowers network-equipment expenditures, through utilization of off-the-shelf hardware, and enables a business case that better aligns operating costs with revenues. Verizon sees SDN and OpenFlow as the ticket to “inexpensive feature insertion for new services and revenue uplift.”

Verizon is not alone. It’s safe to say the others on the ONF board are dealing with variations of the same problem and are seeking similar solutions.

Google Goes Further

Google, for one, isn’t stopping at switches. As Higginbotham explored in an earlier post at GigaOM last week, Google is a fervent proponent of Quagga and the Open Sourcing Routing Project. The search giant’s goals are practical, namely “cheaper, highly programmable routers it can use in its (core) network.” Called the Open LSR, Google’s router, as Higginbotham writes, is “an open-source router that consists of a switch made with merchant silicon and running Open vSwitch that talks to a server that has an OpenFlow-based controller and uses Quagga to generate the routing tables and forwarding information.”

As if the theme needs further belaboring, it’s all about taking cost out of network infrastructure. Google is working with others in the service-provider community to make its low-cost routing dream a reality.

It is clear, then, that the largest service providers, and perhaps may smaller ones besides, want to gain more control over their networks and with the costs associated with them. They have constructed the Open Network Foundation with a clear purpose in mind, they see SDN and Open Flow as solutions to a clearly articulated business problem, and they seem determined to see it through to fruition.

What About the Enterprise?

What remains to be seen is how willing enterprises will be to go along for the SDN ride. This is a point that was hammered home by Peter Cristy of the Internet Research Group, who, as reported by Fewell, told the audience at the Open Networking Summit that SDN and OpenFlow are likely to face significant challenges in cracking the enterprise market. Cristy’s points were valid. His most salient observations were that there have been few OpenFlow “killler apps,” and that enterprises do not favor “reproducing the same thing with new technology,” especially if that technology is new and complicated.

He’s right. But we have to remember that the ONF is captained by service providers, and they are not leading their particular SDN charge because they are motivated by altruistic concern for enterprise networks and their stewards. No, for now at least, the ONF’s conception of SDNs will be applicable to the demographic represented by the composition of the ONF board. Enterprises will have to wait, it seems, and that’s probably good news for the established order of networking vendors, especially for Cisco Systems.

Assessing Market Implications

Still, I have to wonder. Cristy is correct to note that the enterprise accounts for the “biggest part of the networking market.” Nonetheless, times are changing. As more applications move to the cloud, and to cloud service providers, SDN and presumably OpenFlow are likely to increasingly affect the top and bottom lines of networking vendors.

Those companies — Cisco, Juniper, and all the rest — have to keep a wary eye on SDN developments. Even if networking vendors eventually lose a chunk of business at network service providers, they’ll still have the enterprise, presuming they can position themselves correctly and anticipate change rather than react belatedly to it.

There’s a lot at stake as this story plays out in the months and years ahead.